In a market suddenly awash with new analytic DBMS entrants, Aster Data Systems differentiates itself with an aggressive posture: in-database computations, MapReduce integration and commodity hardware. Like several other firms I've talked to recently, the San Carlos-based vendor has a Big Customer (mySpace), a Recent Launch (May 2008) and a Core Team of Hotshots with industry experience. They have been quick out of the gate, and boast 15 customers who are tackling "frontline data warehousing" for problems they could not solve any other way.

It's been fascinating to watch new players garner early wins by asserting that general purpose databases are not optimal for analytics. Since Sybase IQ entered the market in the  early 1990s, other specialists like Esssbase and Redbrick have disappeared into larger firms, and their messages have largely disappeared from the marketing of companies like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. They can be found if you hunt for them, but the fundamental point is not made: analytic problems are better served with specialty products- like OLAP, columnar databases and other architectural innovations.

Aster's 3 founders - CEO Mayank Bawa,  CTO Tasso Argyros and Chief Scientist George Candea - were all involved in Ph. D projects at Stanford. They got together to found a company after tackling some large scale problems for an emerging Valley startup or two and concluding that commodity hardware, in-database analytics, and a carefully interconnected multi-tier architecture would allow them to bring a cost-effective, differentiable product to market.

Some of the architectural pieces are unsurprising. Managing state at scale is the big problem, and the flagship nCluster 3.0's ethernetinterconnect (gigabit or 10-gig) has made it fairly efficient over a large number of commodity (and increasingly cheap) servers. Internally nCLuster uses 3 tiers: dedicated loading nodes that bring data in and partition it; (redundant) working nodes perform reads and updates at the same time; and a "Queen" server group that plans queries. The tiers can be scaled independently and configured differently - for example, loaders can be almost diskless. A lot of power can be brought to bear - 800 cores over a 100-node cluster makes a big impression on most problems.

Software architecture inside the engine is a leading message. nCluster supports ANSI SQL as well as developers who want to write in-database. The idea is to wrap their work in SQL; Aster is extending the language with SQL MapReduce. The alternative, says Ajeet Singh, Director  of Product Management, is to require a single script written by one person, who needs both sets of skills. Aster's model promotes reusability; one programmer codes in java and the SQL programmers can all use it.  A separate execution environment also provides process isolation; problems don't affect other users.

In February, Aster announced the completion of additional funding that brought its total Series B financing to $17 million, led by JAFCO Ventures, and including return backers Sequoia Capital, Cambrian Ventures and First Round Capital. Thus armed, and with a few good references for its half-dozen or so sales teams to leverage, we can expect to hear much more from nCluster - and some new announcements will up the ante more in the months just ahead.

IBM has made it clear that InfoSphere Streams, the commercialized part of the System S research project that has been underway for some years, is a priority, and they are committing substantial investments to it.  In fact, the release was hurried a bit, as I noted in my (hopefully) humorous post about naming for complex event processing (CEP) and related technologies. At a major financial analyst meeeting in May 2009, CEO Sam Palmisano called it out as an IBM opportunity, and Software Group honcho Steve Mills listed it as one of four themes within his topline Information Agenda message. That kind of push makes things happen.

I've seen skepticism about this from people I respect like Curt Monash (here and elsewhere), Neil Raden (here), and Peter Thomas (here), and it's not surprising - there is much evangelism to be done here to establish the vision. What are the use cases? IBM is starting to describe then based on real, money-making engagements, and they will continue to.  Let's look at a few things that will drive this technology into wider use.

• The world is being instrumented.I hardly need to give you the numbers - they're everywhere. It's not just radio telescopes (although that's cool) - it's traffic cams. RFID tags. Trades on financial exchanges. Transactions on electronic consumer systems. And that's only the beginning. There is a class of information for which the right answer is not "let's put it into a box and then look at it." Michael Stonebreaker, a seminal thinker and innovator in database, said as much when he started StreamBase a few years ago, and that firm's lack of breakthrough success so far only indicates to me that they were a bit ahead of the market need. We are deploying more instruments streaming data all the time, and that will only accelerate.
• Early use cases have proved out. Admittedly, some are still rocket science, but in the financial industry (where StreamBase is doing most of its business) the notion that one might usefully filter and react to things as they go by, without building a place to keep them first - or at all - makes sense. And in everyday monitoring-based use, who cares about last month's traffic patterns, or the shipping record for that package last month? Somebody does - but not for every application we'll associate with that business activity. And certainly not for all the interesting ones.
• Tools are emerging.There are SQL-based approaches, including the work being done at SQLStream with standards, and IBM has introduced an Eclipse-based IDE, with its language called Stream Processing Application Declarative Engine (SPADE), that includes visual metaphors that are lightyears away from the thorny approaches of the earliest uses. And with rules engines and decision automation climbing executive wish lists, the combinations could be compelling. Object-oriented databases were a zero-billion dollar market and always will be, because only scientists used them, and they weren't moving toward mainstream use. That is simply not the case here.
• Complementary technologies are available.IBM is coupling InfoSphere Streams with their recently acquired SolidDB in-memory database for some classes of applications. They and other vendors have fashioned adapters to simplify connections to existing industry-standard streams of information in finance, logistics and healthcare, again, shortening the time to deliver something meaningful. And more streaming standards will emerge.
• Expertise will drive proliferation.Complex software is everywhere, and it creates employment opportunities for SIs. Who has one of the biggest such organizations? IBM. Who has demonstrated world-class capability to replicate hardened IP based on engagements they've done a few times? Ditto. As the flywheel picks up speed, watch out.

So, if you think I'm succumbing to the hype, so be it. I believe that we are at the beginning of a new class of applications that will be as fundamentally different from database-based ones as those were from the kind that made single passes of files in the early days of punch-card systems. As each new level of abstraction emerges, we think differently about the world, and the art of the possible. If a baseball player had to compute angles and speeds and gravity and wind and the weight of his bat before swinging, how many hits would he get? And yet, without storing data and doing queries against it, he responds to events with flashes of partial data, context, and some rules, and knocks it out of the park sometimes. Oh, and misses sometimes too. (Raden, that sports analogy was for you.) But that just means we factor that into our thinking about what we try to accomplish, and what's at stake.

Stream-based computing will change the world, and the power of IBM's engine will be a big accelerator of the change. Technology, marketing, sales, services add up. Steve Mills' organization provided 43% of IBM's profit in 2008, and his belief that, as he has told me, "our investments position IBM to do things nobody else can do" is spot on. Mills told the financial analysts at the May 13 meeting that he is focused on "better optimization of the business decision process and becoming more predictive."  Elaborating on that, he spoke about  federation, pattern recognition and prediction - with streams as a key enabler. This is visionary, and in sync with the "Smarter Planet" theme, so it will be relentlessly sold at the highest levels of the world business community. IBM changes markets. What's come so far has been prologue. Change is gonna come.

The last couple of years for Information Builders (IBI) have been a mixed bag. On the one hand, WebFocus, their flagship BI offering, has received stellar reviews, getting top marks from Gartner and Forrester in published research. On the other hand, growth stalled and sputtered a bit for the past year or two, and then the economy went south. But a strong new management focus, the clearing of the field as other leading independent BI vendors were acquired, and some timely new product introductions have set the table for a new surge by the New York-based vendor.

"A large enough qualitative change makes a quantitative change happen."

Gerald Cohen, founder, President and CEO of IBI, made this remark in a recent conversation with IT Market Strategy. Cohen is one of the seminal thinkers in the software industry. At a time when reporting was laboriously done in COBOL, he created the hosted, interpreted environment that launched the fourth-generation language (4GL) product category and rode FOCUS to success and a huge installed based of mainframe, then Digital, and ultimately Windows-based reporting and analysis products. IBI later broke data access out into a separate business and still dominates the market for heterogeneous data gateways with their iWay subsidiary, which also provides a range of other integration solutions that often underlie connections between products from IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and other giants. But the client-server BI wave was not kind: SAS, Cognos, and Business Objects took the newer paradigm to customers more quickly and aggressively, and built a substantial lead.

Michael Corcoran, Sr. V.P. and Chief Marketing Officer, chafes at the lag in market share IBI has suffered, but believes things are about to change for the better. "Those brands are going to struggle to retain their reputation for independence and broad usability," he says. While Cognos and Business Objects built their visibility and revenues dramatically, IBI continued steady performance with one of the most loyal customer bases in the industry and a stellar reputation for quality and support. Equally important, a very high percentage of IBI's customers describe WebFocus as their strategic platform, even if they have other tools scattered around the organization.

IBI's team is filled with employees who have been with the firm for decades. [Disclosure - I worked for the firm two decades ago. Many of the people I knew there are still employees.] They are ramping up the sales organization and trying new go-to-market strategies. "We created a 3-5 day paid solution assessment model," Corocan says. "We take a half day with the CFO, VP of Sales, and VP of Marketing. We identify their pain points and help them build a strategy." Preliminary pilot successes have led to a greater commitment to training additional resources. This is not the only change in the air; recent hires and longtimers alike are ramping new efforts in partnership deals with hardware and software firms and with SIs.

Perhaps the most visible example is IBI's OEM relationship with longtime partner IBM on System I, where Cognos does not run natively. IBM includes WebFocus DB2 Web Query on every shipped unit. At the recent Common, IBM called it the "fastest growing software product in the platform's history." For IBI, it meant 25000 mostly new names. They get a royalty and they can upsell. Execution will be a challenge.   A little probing showed that there are issues in getting to those customers; many are sold through IBM's channel partners and some kinks still have to be worked out in identifying and getting to them. Still, this is a fresh new opportunity if the will and the spending are there to leverage it.

On the product front, IBI seems to have learned the lessons of the new world of open source; they are basing continuing innovations on code including: Tomcat application servers; the Lucene search engine (in Magnify, a new search offering);  and R statistics in WebFocus RStat for predictive analytics.  They are continuing UI innovation with Adobe Flex, Google Maps, and others. 

Qualitative changes indeed - IBI seems (no pun intended) refocused; the buzz seems to be that it's time to take the offensive. SIs are willing to talk again, after watching other leaders acquired by firms that will compete with them; quality and loyalty have built a reservoir of goodwill and referenceable customers for the sales force to leverage, and new products are allowing IBI to once again assert its thought leadership in emergent categories. Perhaps the quantitative changes Cohen spoke of are just around the corner.

Sybase held an analyst event in early May at the NY Stock Exchange, and reviewed a stellar year since their last one. Quarter after quarter, the Dublin, CA. firm has set new records for revenue, increasd profitability, and gained market share. I'll discuss more of the content of today's event in a later post, but this one just couldn't wait: free MicroStrategy with Sybase IQ as part of the promotion of Release 15, which I discussed here, as part of a new joint agreement (the press release is here.)

The announcement went beyond what is said in the press release. Here's the deal: MicroStrategy has granted Sybase a number of licenses which Sybase is choosing (with permission) to pass on to their customers. Microstrategy benefits because, candidly, IQ is doing very well and there is every reason to think its users would like their product. And with Sybase closing significant numbers of deals every quarter, there is real upside in seeding them with Microstrategy seats. If the customer likes the product, of course, there is an upsell opportunity. And both vendors - and the customer - benefit. Nice.

This is not what we analysts like to call a "Barney agreement" ("I love you, you love me...") like so many partnership announcements.  The two vendors have agreed on integrated packaging, joint product certification, and vendor-to-vendor technical support. But in addition, Sybase can now offer MicroStrategy consulting services and education, which is a much more concrete engagement level. One can expect that there will be some new business here.

Greenplum is one of several companies who have defied the notion that "RDBMS has been done," and one of the most successful of late on the high end (of scale, but not necessarily price.) The argument goes that it's a waste of time to build a new enterprise class RDBMS - kernel, optimizer, and associated feature set  - because there is no room left for real innovation. It takes years, deep engineering expertise, and money - and when you're done, your reward is to enter a crowded market dominated by players who have multi-billion dollar deep pockets, massive sales and engineering teams, and legions of loyal customers. A losing proposition. And yet, Greenplum has done it, and is winning deals. Regularly, and at an increasing rate.

I visited the team last week to catch up on recent progress, and their story illustrates the possibilities. If you want a good summary of Greenplum's first two years (2006-07) and technical highlights, there's no need for me to do that here - Curt Monash does an excellent job on this post from 2008, and he recently talked with Ebay about their use of Greenplum on a massive scale in this article. The eBay site is also a harbinger of things to come, as Greenplum settles into a vision of supplementing, feeding, and coexisting with older enterprise data warehouse products that don't cost-effectively handle the new petabyte-scale business opportunities. Monash does a nice job explaining how eBay describes the new opportunities for exploiting data in ways that didn't exist when leading RDBMSs were designed. 

Greenplum's 2006 deal with Sun came at an important time in their arc, and it helped kickstart things. When venture capital was most necessary, as Greenplum hardened its multi-year engineering effort and moved to deploy, support early customers and ramp up sales and partner efforts, Sun's strong endorsement was an important validation. It no doubt helped convince early investors to come on board for Greenplum's C round, and helped open doors for some key early sales, too. So it was natural for me to ask president Scott Yara how much impact he expects from Oracle's potential acquisition of Sun. His answer: "Our relationship with Sun has been a very productive partnership, but from day one our focus has always been about software and leveraging general purpose hardware. As long as Oracle maintains its commitment to be a general purpose systems provider, we have every intention of continuing to support Sun/Solaris, and give our customers the power of choice whether that's Sun/Oracle, Dell, HP, EMC, etc."

Greenplum has racked up 65 customers in two and half years - a pace faster than, say, Teradata over a similar period, Yara says. "Our vision seems to be resonating well in the market: we've been acquiring 8-10 new enterprise customers per quarter, at a pace (wins per sales team) faster than our much larger competitors [i.e. Netezza and Teradata - MA] with a fraction of the sales coverage. We are continuing to aggressively build out that sales force, which today has direct coverage in the US, Asia Pacific, Japan and EMEA."  IT Market Strategy believes that Greenplum will double its number of sales teams in 2009. The firm has recently announced a partnership with EMC, and has a new release about to launch. And Greenplum has a clear message about their offering: a petabyte-scale database for data warehousing and business intelligence. They know what kind of deals they are after - big ones. And they're getting them.

So yes, there is still room for innovation. Numerous firms are building off open source code lines, as Greenplum and others have done with postgres, adding features targeted at specific markets, and winning business. Open source + capital has created an intriguing new model of rapid innovation in "mature" markets, and the database space - like BI - is not a done deal. It is indeed possible to escape the gravity well, if you execute. Greenplum is getting it done, and is among the new stars to watch.

Lucidera has a unique value proposition. Yes, they do BI - so do many other vendors. Yes, they do a SaaS model - ditto. How to set yourself apart? Focus on improving performance, not just reporting and leaving that to the person on the other side of the glass. Add context, best practice and benchmarks, guidance - and service. Lucidera calls it "domain specific analytic applications." Here at IT Market Strategy, we tend to complain about people not calling such things analytics applications, but I won't quibble here. What matters is that it is succeeding.

Lucidera, who first shipped in 2007, has passed the 50 customer mark and is accelerating. They have shifted selling strategy: recognizing that their market is still on the business side (LOB), what Vice President of Market Development and co-founder Ken Rudin likes to call "shadow IT," they have gone over to a strategic selling model. Lucidera sells into the sales function with a Pipeline Healthcheck. They sell applied analytics that prescribe better selling tactics based on their benchmarks and analysis. The customer's VP of Sales must be included in the deal, or they don't proceed. Lucidera has moved from transactional selling, hiring more senior reps who can be consultative partners to their customers. Eating their own food, Rudin claims, has led to a 100% increase in average order size, and a  30% decrease in sales cycle time. Q4 2008 was their best quarter yet, and while Q1 saw the same challenges other vendors are facing, it was encouraging.

Applying aging analysis like time to win (and time to lose, which is very significant and often overlooked) directly against salesforce.com data has given Lucidera an easy-to-find target market and a solid success rate. "Instant insight" is the mantra, and actionable advice is a service play that is resonating with the small firms that often have not ramped up expert selling strategy yet. Some, Rudin claims, are already asking for a consultative review once a quarter because "they understand the analysis and the concepts, but without continual reinforcement, they often forget what the key insights and conclusions are." This may turn out to be another market opportunity, but Lucidera is very focused right now on where they are. Guided analytics are a good step, even if they may need to go further.

The platform is stable, with built in ETL, a column-based data store, and Mondrian-based OLAP from Pentaho. The Spring release (it even sounds like salesforce.com) has extended visualization and analysis capabilities. New trend metrics and relative time capabilities, atop dashboards and gadgets that can be edited and drilled through for ad hoc analysis of the data that Lucidera imports, have enhanced usability significantly. They've moved to a Flex UI, which has also made a big difference. The next step will be to move into other domains, still in sales and marketing. Focus means a lot, and we expect Lucidera to move in a measured way, choosing and building for highly targeted audiences. It's a winning strategy.

IT Market Strategy recently sat down with Marge Breya, Executive Vice President & GM Intelligence Platform & NetWeaver of SAP BusinessObjects, to discuss the first full year of life within SAP after being acquired at the beginning of 2008. Breya oversees full product line responsibility for BI and information management  solutions, as well as the company's OnDemand business. In addition, Breya is responsible for solution management of SAP NetWeaver within the Technology Group at SAP AG. Prior to joining SAP via the Business Objects acquisition, Breya served in a number of executive roles at BEA Systems, where she was senior vice president (SVP), CMO, and chief strategy officer (CSO); and Sun Microsystems, where she served in various executive management roles. In this excerpt form our conversation, the discussion turned to how the BO portfolio and the SAP portfolio would combine for greater leverage.

You're busy right now thinking about the developmental opportunities for how [your] portfolios work together.

We've got some early things coming out.  For example, at the SAP Insider event [see http://bit.ly/lqjRz for IT Market Strategy comments on that event] we showed the combination of Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) and Polestar - that's a good combination of "in-memory platform meets analytical tool," where  1+1 =3 for the user. You get a Google Earth-like approach to massive amounts of data.

The way that BI products will exploit BWA has multiple flavors. There are differences in the way SAP Business Object integrates with BWA versus everyone else.

I'm not sure we've talked about how other companies will get access to BWA at all, yet, publicly. The open accelerator technology - the TREX technology - is not currently embedded in BW. It is a columnar optimization and a calculation engine that lets you do pretty aggressive compression on data.  As a result, the resulting performance is much different from relational environments, and doesn't require the setups and aggregate building you have to manage even in an OLAP environment.

Today's BWA users are only using it with SAP data. And with SAP's BW offering, usage for non-SAP data is still minimal. Now along comes Business Objects with a much broader remit: help customers make decisions on all their data. So this fairly formidable asset of yours still has a wall around it. Where do you see yourself going in broadening that asset? I would imagine that you want to see a bigger target market.

Let's tease apart the warehouse and accelerator technology. We have relationships with Oracle, IBM, and others. We'll soon be announcing connectivity to BW, for analytical stores, etc. And we're broadening those relationships. That's important because we want to work well with all large enterprise data warehouse (EDW) vendors.

Does that mean BW becomes "more federatable"?

Yes, it will be able to play a supporting role. Some people use BW as their EDW, but we want to make sure that it's also a first class citizen in any EDW strategy. On the other side, coming from a semiconductor background, I feel strongly that an in-memory analytics engine can be a digital signal processor (DSP) for the kinds of calculations that customers will need to do. There is a broad range of acceleration technology we can bring to market.  That technology needs to be applied to any data source on the face of the planet.

Personally, I don't want to spend the money for high-priced Adobe tools to make notes in PDFs I see from vendors in briefings. So I decided to try out one of the free download products, and the following is a quick review.

I downloaded PDF X-Change viewer from Tracker Software Products' website here. The usual process, a bit clumsy, followed - unpack, run the installer. Told it I don't want it to be the default PDF viewer. Then I opened a few PDFs to test. First impression - great speed. Second: sticky notes, text boxes are easy to find on the menu. I drew some circles around things for highlights, created sticky notes (out in the area away from the page so I could still see it - nice. Switched tools and tried the text box tool, which stays in place on the page itself - less useful if the page is densely packed. Used the search tool to find multiple references to the same thing, and quickly check if "partners" was mentioned. Worked fine. Highlighted some text, underlined some text - all works very nicely.

Finally, I saved the annotated files. Then I opened them with Adobe's free Reader. My additions were still there, and in fact the Reader tools even showed them to me in the annotations pane. I was unable to make any changes to them, but when I went back into PDF X-Change I could.

Get this product if you need to anotate PDFs. It will make your life somewhat simpler if you like to keep notes with the materials. I doubt that I'll use Reader much now - I'm setting that default.

IBM has taken another key step in its Information Agenda strategy, improving customers' ability to analyze, understand and remediate existing data by acquiring Exeros. There is a fundamental business problem that grows with data volume: an understanding gap. As new development, acquisition and integration of multiple systems takes place, meaning and process understanding are often obscured or lost entirely. At the edge, this is manifested when new BI efforts attempt to find data and its meaning. Exeros Discovery is a leading solution to that problem. My good friend Jim Kobielus of Forrester has provided some excellent background in his blog here. Some other firms are also pursuing this kind of BI-related analysis, Balanced Insight comes to mind, and I'll blog about them soon. IBM's ambition is broader than that, and acquiring Exeros is a key enabler of its vision.

Creating, maintaining, and especially optimizing corporate information assets rarely proceed in an orderly fashion. We tend to solve the business problems in front of us, and big picture issues get short shrift. Preventing and remediating redundant, inefficient and obscure data sprawl takes discipline, time and analytical skills that are, and will always be, in short supply in most organizations. Architecture and stewardship projects all too often fall to the bottom of the priority list because something else "must be done sooner." Stewardship projects using MDM and data quality products  often take a long time - too long in many cases to get the funding and resources they need. Exeros was having success in the market by shortening the early stages of these projects. They have described a number of marquee customers who achieved substantial savings in MDM and DW efforts by automating the analysis needed to get the project launched. Numbers like "10x reduction" or "cutting 70%" have been part of Exeros' message.  IBM's goal here is clear: it wants to lower the barriers that prevent responsible data architecture practices from gaining a foothold.

It's no accident, then, that while IBM's Arvind Krishna talked about InfoSphere in the analyst call about the Exeros acquisition, he also noted the expected synergies with the Optim product line. I've talked about those products here, and the development and enhancement of Optim's products has been aggressive. IT Market Strategy expects to see new announcements from Optim before the quarter is over. The addition of Exeros adds another important tool to IBM's arsenal. "Discovery by itself is useless," Exeros' Piyush Gupta said on the call. Perhaps that was a bit too strong. But there is no question that the efficiency, validation and remediation capabilities of Exeros Validator, which can apply business rules found by Exeros Discovery (or manually input) will have an accelerating effect on projects. and strengthen IBM's Information Agenda story.

The people of Exeros - executives, engineering, sales - and even (in a very unusual step) reseller partners - are apparently all coming aboard. And they are a good team. But the leverage of a sales and technical team like IBM's will mean we are about to see a familiar tale unfold. Exeros had recently moved to an indirect sales model, and suddenly they have 1000+  IBM salespeople (and soon the new BAO team, discussed here) pushing them in the marketplace. The "acquire, distribute, bluewash and integrate - then sell even more" model is alive and well, and we can expect to see substantial revenue in the very near term from this deal. IBM may have chosen a terrible time to make the announcement, letting it get buried in the tsunami of announcements from the Websphere brand's Impact event, but that will not slow down field level execution.

 Increasingly, IBM is aligning its business unites to delivery synergistically and build cross-domain successes. IBM Global Business Services (GBS - $20B in revenue in 2008) has added its first new service line since IBM acquired PWC. Two other units, the software group and IBM Research, have joined with GBS to create the Business Analysis and Optimization line, intended to make IBM the dominant player delivering advanced analytics focused on optimizing business outcomes. 

GBS has pursued the capture and reusable packaging of intellectual property and methodologies in its engagements for some time, encapsulating business processes, industry requirements, standards and regulations for reuse. IBM proposes to combine those assets with software components and advanced work done in IBM Research to deliver a "predict and prescribe" approach to its customers' business challenges.

This is a formidable array of assets, ammunition for a 4000-person organization pursuing a carefully targeted set of competencies:

• BI and Performance Management
• Advanced Analytics and Optimization
• Enterprise Information Management
• Enterprise Content Management
• Business Analytics and Optimization (BAO) Strategy

All the contributors bring substantial skin to the game. Ambuj Goyal, who heads the information management portfolio for IBM Software Group (SWG), told me, "We're harnessing everything we've built" - data management and data warehousing tools, BI, content management, and other components. He's been hammering on the notion of an information agenda as part of IBM's Information on Demand strategy, and driving awareness of the need for data quality and stewardship to satisfy executive demand for trusted data. One in three execs says they don't, even for the relatively mundane types of reporting that are still commmonplace.

In IBM Research, Brenda Dietrich heads a team of 150 mathematics PhDs, many of whom have been working directly with customers to build predictive models. Three key plays are in the first round: risk and fraud analytics; analytics and data optimization; and advanced customer insight, which draws upon BAO head Fred Balboni's recent successes driving GBS business in the retail sector.

The new organization model, in typical IBM fashion, will be rolled out on a massive scale. Most of the people in the organization are being "re-badged;" they aren't new, dedicated headcount, but they have experience in many facets of the problems to be tackled, and are in an accelerated program designed to bring them up to speed to meet an expected demand curve that IBM believes will be very steep. I would not bet against them.

Still, this new effort is only a step on a journey the information technology industry needs to travel. "Predict and prescribe" is necessary, but not sufficient to achieving true analytics-based automation, where the "prescription" is applied to operations within policy- and rules-based guidelines. In such a model, we deliver guidance to decision makers for the exceptional cases, freeing them for more creative and aggressive endeavors. Some advanced organizations have already built such applications, and they will have a leg up. If you are among them, IT Market Strategy would like to hear your story. Please contact us - leave a comment here, or email mervadrian@gmail.com.

Sybase is celebrating. Let everyone else compain about the bad economy; the perennial "Tier 1A" database, mobility and analytics vendor just had its best quarter ever to kick off 2009 - its 6th consecutive record quarter. With 14% growth in license revenue (31% in database) and a margin of 21%, there is certainly much to be happy about. The company is particularly happy to point to its highest-ever quarterly cash flow from operations - $97.4 million. The investment in messaging continues to generate substantial results: at $43.4M, it was nearly 17% of the firm's revenue. Sybase seems at last to have anchored itself solidly in the billion dollar club.

Many parts of the portfolio were refreshed as the year began - a new Sybase IQ release (version 15, with another point release anticpated soon), continued expansion of Sybase's risk analytics business with complex event processing, Mobile Office for the iPhone, and mobile payment services.  Sybase's reach as a premier mobility player was enhanced when SAP -- with 40 million licensed users -- chose the new Sybase Unwired Platform to extend SAP Business Suite to all major mobile device platforms.

A hidden gem in the portfolio has begun to emerge of late, as data movement and the creation of additional data stores for analytics coninue to grow in importance and move downmarket. Sybase Replication Server, with over 2500 customers, has long been one of the industry's most mature and robust products in its space. It has had a recent refresh and substantial new activity. IT Market Strategy visited Sybase's Dublin, California headquarters for a look at Replication Server version 15.2. Rep Server has doubled its revenue in the past 4 years, and continues to have a solid business (15% of its total) in heterogeneous data sources (Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server are major sources, and DB2 less so.)

Several themes govern Sybase's recent releases and plans for the product, starting with performance, which has taken substantial leaps. Sybase claims 400-600% improvement over version 12.6 by adding numerous features including:

• support for its own bulk load interface for Sybase ASE (other vendor bulk load hooks will follow)
• non-blocking COMMIT that is similar to Oracle's functionality
• replication of SQL statements for execution in the target DBMS (instead of row-by-row changes)

Other additions include more support for architects and programers; Sybase PowerDesigner has model-driven support for script generation. With 40% of its customers using Rep Server for data integration, Sybase is more aggressively adding support for Oracle datatypes (3 product releases in a year to support this) and pushing harder on extending to non-Sybase data. Even though many of its customers have 20 or more instances, Sybase sees substantial upside in the non-Sybase data within its sizable base, and substantial opportunity in its pipeline for new name business as well. One customer we discussed is using Rep Server to migrate from one verion of Oracle to another, and there are many such opportunities. There are many other use cases - check out an attractive set of demos here (sound alert - it will immediately start talking to you.).

The continued success of Sybase IQ for analytics applications also offers susbtantial upside. 20% of today's Rep Server use cases are real-time reporting. With a planned enhancement to improve Sybase IQ loading , Rep Server will have an additional high-value use case to pursue within its own custoemr population. Many other new features are planned in a multi-release roadmap for 2009 and 2010, and IT Market Strategy expects to see Sybase using more of its cash to support and promote Replication Server in the future. The results are fairly predictable: Sybase has demonstrated continued effective execution, and 2009 should continue on its current growth path.